427.02 The Universe Going Green: Extraordinarily Strong [OIII]5007 in Typical Dwarf Galaxies at z~3 (Matthew Arnold Malkan)

Date & Time

Jan 7th at 1:00 PM until 2:00 PM

Presentations

Location

We constructed the average SEDs of U-dropout galaxies in the Subaru Deep Field. This sample contains more than 5000 Lyman-break galaxies at z~3. Their average near- and mid-IR colors were obtained by stacking JHK and IRAC imaging, in bins of stellar mass. At the lowest mass bins an increasingly strong excess flux is seen in the K filter. This excess can reach 1 magnitude in the broadband filter, and we attribute it to strong \OIII $\lambda{5007}$ line emission. The equivalent width is extraordinarily high, reaching almost 1000\Ang\ for the average z=3 galaxy at an i magnitude of 27. Such extreme [OIII] emission is very rare in the current epoch, only seen in a handful of metal-deficient dwarf starbursts sometimes referred to as ''Green Peas". In contrast, extreme [OIII]--strong enough to dominate the entire broad-band SED--was evidently the norm for faint galaxies at high redshift. We present evidence that these small but numerous galaxies were primarily responsible for the reionization of the Universe.